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Ruskin on Venice by Robert Hewison

That the works of John Ruskin are not known well these days - and in many cases not known at all - would have seemed quite incredible to his 19th-century contemporaries. Whether they worshipped or reviled him, they would almost all have conceded that he was a literary giant: not merely far and away the greatest art critic of the day, or of any day, but an incomparable prose

stylist. Ruskin (1819-1900) was an artist of language to match Dickens or Tennyson, a Victorian sage whose authority rivalled or overshadowed that of Arnold and Pater and Carlyle. And yet how many people nowadays take pleasure in reading Modern Painters, or The Stones of Venice - the latter being, as Robert Hew­ison rightly states in his assiduously researched, handsomely illustrated new book on the English writer and the Italian city, Ruskin's most concentrated, most rigorous masterpiece?